At about 6:45 he Mike Pecoraro) went to the mechanical shop in the second subbasement, ate his breakfast and chatted with his co-workers who were also arriving for the normal 8:00 a.m. beginning of their shift. Mike's assignment that day would be to continue constructing a gantry that would be used to pull the heads from the 2,500 ton chillers, located in the 6th sub- basement level of the tower. 49,000 tons of refrigeration equipment were located in the lower level of the tower. The 2,500 ton units were the smallest in use...
Deep below the tower, Mike Pecoraro was suddenly interrupted in his grinding task by a shake on his shoulder from his co-worker. "Did you see that?" he was asked. Mike told him that he had seen nothing. "You didn't see the lights flicker?", his co-worker asked again. "No," Mike responded, but he knew immediately that if the lights had flickered, it could spell trouble. A power surge or interruption could play havoc with the building's equipment. If all the pumps trip out or pulse meters trip, it could make for a very long day bringing the entire center's equipment back on-line.
Mike told his co-worker to call upstairs to their Assistant Chief Engineer and find out if everything was all right. His co-worker made the call and reported back to Mike that he was told that the Assistant Chief did not know what happened but that the whole building seemed to shake and there was a loud explosion. They had been told to stay where they were and "sit tight" until the Assistant Chief got back to them. By this time, however, the room they were working in began to fill with a white smoke. "We smelled kerosene," Mike recalled, "I was thinking maybe a car fire was upstairs", referring to the parking garage located below grade in the tower but above the deep space where they were working.
The two decided to ascend the stairs to the C level, to a small machine shop where Vito Deleo and David Williams were supposed to be working. When the two arrived at the C level, they found the machine shop gone.
"There was nothing there but rubble, "Mike said. "We're talking about a 50 ton hydraulic press – gone!" The two began yelling for their co-workers, but there was no answer. They saw a perfect line of smoke streaming through the air. "You could stand here," he said, "and two inches over you couldn't breathe. We couldn't see through the smoke so we started screaming." But there was still no answer.
The two made their way to the parking garage, but found that it, too, was gone. "There were no walls, there was rubble on the floor, and you can't see anything" he said.
They decided to ascend two more levels to the building's lobby. As they ascended to the B Level, one floor above, they were astonished to see a steel and concrete fire door that weighed about 300 pounds, wrinkled up "like a piece of aluminum foil" and lying on the floor. "They got us again," Mike told his co-worker, referring to the terrorist attack at the center in 1993. Having been through that bombing, Mike recalled seeing similar things happen to the building's structure. He was convinced a bomb had gone off in the building.
Consider the implications of what Mr. Pecoraro describes: At this point the only overt damage to the building was the plane crash some 95 floors above, which could not have caused violent explosions underground. Since the towers were anchored at the base to the bedrock the shaking caused by the crash would have been greatest close to the crash site, getting progressively weaker as it approached the rigid attachment at the bottom. Yet the underground damage he describes can not have been the result of a mere shaking - nothing short of an explosion could reduce the contents of a machine shop to rubble.
http://st12.startlogic.com/~xenonpup/underground/underground_explosions.htm
Response from Ron Olesko in the Help ForumSubject: Mike and Arti stayed in the stairwell at the
-posted at Ron's request by Joe Offer-
From: WFDU - Ron Olesko
Date: 29-Jan-07 - 03:40 PM
I know this thread was closed, but I would like to request that it either be re-opened or deleted completely. The person who started the thread - "y" - left out some important parts of the story, and they gave the story a very different slant.
The article they quote from also included this -
The smoke in the stairwell was constant and at one point, Mike told Arti that he was going to catch a quick breath of fresh air. He walked out into the main lobby of the building, seeing it for the first time.
"When I walked out into the lobby, it was incredible," he recalled. "The whole lobby was soot and black, elevator doors were missing. The marble was missing off some of the walls. 20-foot section of marble, 20 by 10 foot sections of marble, gone from the walls". The west windows were all gone. They were missing. These are tremendous windows. They were just gone. Broken glass everywhere, the revolving doors were all broken and their glass was gone. Every sprinkler head was going off. I am thinking to myself, how are these sprinkler heads going off? It takes a lot of heat to set off a sprinkler head. It never dawned on me that there was a giant fireball that came through the air of the lobby. I never knew that until later on. The jet fuel actually came down the elevator shaft, blew off all the (elevator) doors and flames rolled through the lobby. That explained all the burnt people and why everything was sooted in the lobby.
Reading th description from the person in question describing the fire ball that everyone else saw certainly gives a different perspective than what "Y" was trying to lead everyone to believe.
While I applaud you for closing the thread, I think that having it exist in its current form without a proper rebuttal helps perpetuate the tragic myths that could this issue. I would strongly suggest that the thread be deleted completely if it cannot be reopened.